ezmlm-web

Overview

ezmlm-web is a web interface for the administration of ezmlm mailing lists. It allows complete control over their configuration by using a web browser. User-based access control relieves administrators from the burden of managing all their mailing lists on their own.

History

The original author of ezmlm-web is Guy Antony Halse. He maintained it up to version 2.1. By then it was functionally complete and convenient.

Since September 02000 no new releases were published.

In January 02005 Guy allowed me to continue the project. I will try to incorporate the suggestions that were sent to Guy so far. Additional security improvements and translations will be integrated.

Your suggestions are welcome and will improve ezmlm-web whenever possible.

How can ezmlm-web help you?

ezmlm uses a mainly command line interface for the creation and maintainence of mailing lists. While this is very convenient for the average systems administrator who is used to such interfaces, it restrains him from transferring administrative work to users who want to manage a community on their own.

ezmlm-web is an attempt to hide the complexities of managing a mailing list behind and intuative, easy to use web based interface. The idea behind this is threefold. Firstly just about everyone these days can use a web browser, or can learn very quickly. Secondly it provides almost complete platform independence on the client side - there are GUI web browsers available for every major modern operating system. Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, it makes easy remote administration a real possibility.

ezmlm-web allows the user to easily add and remove mailing list subscribers, create and delete mailing lists as well as alter the configuration of existing mailing lists. Almost every aspect of the mailing list is controlable through the web front end, allowing the list user to do most things without the assistance of the systems administrators.

Features

Some of the important features that ezmlm-web offers are;

• Full Virtual Host Support - ezmlm-web hides the complexities of setting up virtually hosted mailing lists from your users.
• Multi-Level Access - You can control who has access to different mailing lists.
• Name Association - You can enter any RFC 822 email address, and it will display the nice name while refering to the email address.
• Configurable Interface - Most of the "look & feel" of ezmlm-web is configured through templates, allowing you to easily co-ordinate it with your existing website.
• Language Independence - ezmlm-web can be easily reconfigured for different locales and languages. For now you can only choose between english and german - your contribution for other languages is welcome.
• Context Sensitive Help - Context sensitive help is provided throughout ezmlm-web in the form of image TITLE tags, which serve as tooltips.
• Full support for all command line options - ezmlm-web has been updated to take advantage of all the command line features of ezmlm-idx 0.40. And should be compatible with any further releases :-)
• Browser Independence - ezmlm-web has been tested with Mozilla 1.73, Firefox 1.0, Netscape Navigator 4.7, Lynx 2.8.3, w3m 0.1.11-pre and Internet Explorer 5.0
• Platform Independence - ezmlm-web should run on any platform that can run ezmlm and Perl
• Multiple Subscribes/Unsubscribes - ezmlm-web supports file uploads for bulk subscription of email addresses, and multiple selects for bulk deletes.

Requirements

A full list of requirements is available in the README file in the distribution.

Basically, however, you require the following on your system:

• Qmail
• ezmlm
• Perl 5
• + a few perl modules (including the Mail::Ezmlm module from the author of ezmlm-web)
• and a webserver such as Apache

How you can contribute

You can help to improve ezmlm-web in many ways. Some of them are:

• translate it to another language (this takes about an hour) - for now english and german are available
• create a nice stylesheet to improve its appearance
• send me patches you would like to see incorporated
• tell me if you find evidences of my poor english tongue on this page

If you are interested in the development code of ezmlm-web, then you may anonymously checkout the subversion repository at https://svn.systemausfall.org/svn/admin-tools/ezmlm-web.

Some final words ...

As I am no native english speaker, I will gladly accept every hint to improve the appearance of this website.

Nearly every line of ezmlm-web was written by Guy Antony Halse - thanks a lot for this work!

If you have any suggestions regarding ezmlm-web, please send a mail to ezmlm-web[AT]sumpfralle.de.